Monday, May 9, 2011

According to the letter (in Japanese) from Yuhei Sato, governor of Fukushima, to Akihiro Ohata, Minister of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, dated May 2, there are 62 sewage treatment facilities in Fukushima Prefecture.

So they tested 20. There are 42 more. Oh boy. The result of the test is here (in Japanese). Pages 4 and 5 are the sludge analysis; they tested only cesium-134, cesium-137, and iodine-131. (They should have tested for strontium and plutonium, too.)

In the letter, the governor of Fukushima shows much concern for the disruption of the sewage treatment in Fukushima, and demands that the national government come up with a safe way to treat radioactive sludge as soon as possible. He says it is absolutely necessary to be able to continue to process the sewage, radioactive or not. His concern seems to be about treatment, and safety for the treatment facility workers.

Ummmm... what about the radioactive cement that has been created out of your radioactive sludge and already been sold, governor? How about radioactive smoke from the incinerator? Or cesium released into the river after the water was treated? Along the way, the rivers into which these facilities release the treated water may be the source of someone else's drinking water or irrigation water for farming.

2
comments:

Anonymous
said...

Robbie001 sez:

I'm sure the government will just raise the level of exposure they deem not to cause "immediate" harm to humans. If treating radioactive sludge was cheap and easy we wouldn't have a nuclear waste problem. Isotope separation is expensive and time consuming and we are talking about separation on an industrial scale. I think it would be easier and more likely to convince all the locals to hold in their waste until the emergency is over in a couple of years.

I bet they will fall back on "dilution is the solution" I could see them diluting this sludge and dumping it at the Fukushima facility probably in the same place all the mystery water went from unit #1. As I said before there are probably other natural concentration systems we haven't even thought about. This same process is happening in any effected estuary systems along the coast. Contaminated runoff and sediments are collecting and accumulating in natural filters all across the region.

As for building materials I bet they'll figure out some way to say the dilution factor of the concrete will lower the exposure to acceptable levels. It isn't like contaminated material hasn't found it's way into building material before.

But the Chinese are looking a little closer after Fukushima and I don't see where they are touting these buildings as hormesis health spas. As a matter of fact the government bought up the hottest ones and left them empty. Of course everything is fine I mean who tracked the health of the workers who were exposed to the raw materials before they were made into re-bar and entombed in concrete? Keep in mind orphaned Cobalt-60 has killed on more than one continent.

http://www.fair.org/blog/2011/03/18/ann-coulter-on-oreilly-radiation-is-good-for-you/「 And that Taiwan study demonstrating that radioactive cobalt-60 built into an Taiwan apartment building protected the inhabitants from cancer? It contained a "major flaw" in that it failed to control for age--where a subsequent study that did control for age found an increased incidence of cancer associated to the apartment building. As a summary of the literature on Wikipedia puts it:

In popular treatments of radiation hormesis, a study of the inhabitants of apartment buildings in Taiwan has received prominent attention. The building materials had been accidentally contaminated with cobalt-60 but the study found cancer mortality rates 96.4 percent lower than in the population as a whole. However, this study compared the relatively young irradiated population with the much older general population of Taiwan, which is a major flaw. A subsequent study by Hwang et al. (2006) found a significant exposure-dependent increase in cancer in the irradiated population, particularly leukemia in men and thyroid cancer in women, though this trend is only detected amongst those who were first exposed before the age of 30. 」

About my coverage of Japan Earthquake of March 11

I am Japanese, and I not only read Japanese news sources for information on earthquake and the Fukushima Nuke Plant but also watch press conferences via the Internet when I can and summarize my findings, adding my observations.

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Well, this was, until March 11, 2011. Now it is taken over by the events in Japan, first earthquake and tsunami but quickly by the nuke reactor accident. It continues to be a one-person (me) blog, and I haven't even managed to update the sidebars after 5 months... Thanks for coming, spread the word.------------------This is an aggregator site of blogs coming out of SKF (double-short financials ETF) message board at Yahoo.

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